I just did. I was using sarcasm by the way.
Just pointing out that you were arguing with yourself.
Again it is your idealization of the ritual that strikes. Two adults can make a contract on how they divide the house if they split up and be happy with it even if it isn't the legal equivalent that comes with the ritual. You can think it is better, but you're pushing your views on everyone.
That may be so, but right now the only way that a contract like that is as comprehensive and binding as marriage contracts is to get married. The 'ritual' you keep alluding to is no different that the 'ritual' necessary to create any other contract -- you sign and you're done. Again, you seem to be conflating religious marriage and it's rituals with actual requirements. You can have a civil ceremony solemnized, if you want, but it's not necessary. So your 'ritual' argument is very flat. Perhaps there's a language barrier, and you just mean 'you can't do it unless you get married?' In which case it seems you're arguing semantics.
Also, that two adults have a contract between them doesn't mean it will automatically be a net positive for the children of those two adults, whether the contract is granted by the government or not. Prohibiting couples who didn't go through the ritual from adpting foster kids is just discrimination as the ritual doesn't automatically provide better benefits to the kids.
Of course it isn't an automatic. It's one screening step, not the only. The only prohibition in on couples that don't any legal ties. It's rational to expect there to be legal ties and protections in place before allowing joint adoption/fostering.
And yet the Utah government still lets single people adopt foster kids. Seems the well being of the kids isn't really what it cares about.
Yes, of course they do, and the barrier is higher because they have to show they have similar things to offer than couples do. Which is also rational. You seem to confuse the requirements for two people to adopt/foster a child, where they share the legal and social responsibility for the child, with a general requirement. It's not. If two people want to adopt the same child, they have to have a legally recognized relationship with each other first. This is because the state cannot recognize a corporate existence without a legal basis. Marriage is the legal basis for corporate existence between couples, so that's the bar the state uses for the corporate adoption/fostering of a child.
You're making this far too difficult in an attempt to find some way that this reasonable bar is the same are racial or sexual-orientation discrimination. It's not.
You did. You said it prevents people from breaking up on a whim because of the legal entanglements of the parents. It is false. Married people divorce on whims. You also keep saying that the legal entanglement the adults are in is a positive for the kids. Reality is far more complexe than you like to view it. That they are legally tied up can just make things horrible for kids. Long messy divorces happen all the time because people are tied up legally with each other and you can't say those are in a child's interest.
Divorce is a far different process than merely breaking up. Surely I don't need to explain that to you? And being a different, and harder, process than breaking up, that does place an adverse incentive against doing it on a whim. Does it prevent it? No, but there are no guarantees. But it is fairly well documented that marriages divorce with more consideration than couples break up, making that a positive point in favor of placing the child in a marriage household.
I'm not making the world more simple -- it is very complex. But you're attempting to make a simple decision point into something more complex because you want it to be indicative of unfairness or illegal discrimination. Which is why you keep moving the goalposts when you can't get to where you want to be with the arguments you've made. Granted, you've at least settled into a semi-static position re: couples and fostering (after losing the argument about couples and adoption), but you're not making headway by introducing arguments not being made.
The state MUST discriminate in the placing of foster children. Even you must agree that a the state must have some minimum standards by which they choose foster homes -- not all homes can qualify. So, once we've agreed discrimination must take place, then we have to start looking at the whys and wherefores of that discrimination -- at the tools and goals. The state has an interest in placing children into stable homes. Single people can provide stable homes, but have a much higher bar than couples do. Couples can provide stable homes, but unmarried couples present a risk that can be ameliorated by requiring marriage. So the state requires marriage for couples because it reduces risk for the child. That's it, no evil plan to prevent the wrong sort from fostering, just an example of an imperfect tool being used in a messy world to try to achieve a useful result.
At the moment, we haven't adopted yet, just as our home study was on its way back to us, we got a surprise test result...
Catching up on the conversation: a law that singles out one group for another is almost always unfair, and thus wrong (barring criminals, I think you can still discriminate against them...)
adoption seems to be how most gay couples grow a family, so that law has a nasty side effect. I can see thinking that married couples will be more stable than unmarried ones, but given the divorce rate, that's likely not supported by statistics. I would think it shouldn't be a factor, so long as they look for other indicators of a stablity.
We routinely discriminate in legal ways. Eyesight and pilots. Fitness and firefighters. Intelligence and doctors. We have a world built on discrimination for good and legal reasons. The issue here is 'is marriage a reasonable metric with which to discriminate.' The state thinks so, because they believe it helps protect and provide for the child. Perhaps it doesn't, but arguments that 'that's discrimination and therefore bad' miss the point. The point should be showing that there is a better metric that can be used that's at least as good as the marriage one. If you can do that, than there's both reason and merit to changing the process.
Personally, I think it is a bit outdated. The modern concepts and expectations of marriage are shifting from the expectations the law was built on. Even 20 years ago, this wouldn't even be a consideration. But today's world increasingly looks on marriage as a legal convenience rather than anything more, and so it should probably lose it's position as an effective measure of stability. But only if it can be shown that it has lost all effectiveness (or enough that it becomes harmful) and/or if a better metric for the protection of the child can be shown to exist. This needs to be balanced against the cost and time of implementing a new metric as well, as that's a critical part of an overworked and underfunded program's cost/benefit analysis. For now, I think that it should probably stay, even if it is outdated, due to limited harm, residual usefulness, and lack of a better option.
